Making Words!

When kids are learning to read and write they often form their own spelling. The main question is how do we get our students to begin learning new words and spelling them correctly without forcing

them to do monotonous spelling quizzes?

One example is giving students an assortment of letters and have them make as many new words as they can. This will allow them to try new words and spellings to see what they can figure out on their own.

Another way is to make a fun word family using a fun craft. I think this would be especially fun because I love giving students a chance to be creative and do different word projects based on their preferences, and that would be an easy project to make lots of different word families for students to choose from.

Our articles this week gave us many do's and don'ts for teaching new words, but I think the most important aspect is to keep it interesting. If students get bored learning new words, they are more likely to not listen or be reluctant to write new words in their free writing.



How do you think we can actively engage our students to learn new words and make connections to old ones? Do you remember how your teachers integrated this into your elementary classrooms?